The Best Mobile App & Design News

Ben Lee

CEO and Co-founder of Neon Roots

Ben Lee is the co-founder and CEO of Neon Roots, a digital development agency with a mission to destroy the development model and rebuild it from the ground up. After a brief correspondence with Fidel Castro at age nine, Ben decided to start doing things his own way, going from busboy to club manager at a world-class nightclub before he turned 18. Since then, Ben has founded or taken a leading role in 5 businesses in everything from software development to food and entertainment.

Recent years have seen the rise of the celebrity chef. Media is dominated by the likes of Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Gordon Ramsay, while you can’t turn on your television without catching an episode of Top Chef, MasterChef, Iron Chef, or countless other Chef-inspired programs. Public excitement over food has sent many to their own kitchens, hoping to recreate the dishes they’ve seen on TV. But while many are happy to toss together whatever ingredients Rachel Ray suggests, some still strive for a more proper culinary education. Enter Salted.

The brainchild of Jeff Applebaum, a passionate home chef and foodie in his own right, Salted is offering a world-class crash course in all things culinary without the hefty price tag that comes with brick and mortar institutions.

But this isn’t merely an educational substitution – this isn’t home cooks on Youtube telling you how to make their grandma’s secret recipes. Salted looks to rival the likes of top tier culinary schools like Le Cordon Bleu or L’Academie de Cuisine, all from your home computer.

Jeff saw the huge gap between those that wanted to get a world class education and those that could actually afford it, and through his online cooking school, he knew that gap could be closed. Salted is a proper culinary education, building long-term relationships with their students, and 100% preparing them for cooking in the real world.

You’re learning skills from expert chefs with step-by-step instructions in hi-definition video tutorials. The site covers everything from How To Cook BootCamp to Introduction to Mexican Cooking to GameDay Food Staples. Honestly, there’s too much to mention.

There’s also some free content there as well including recipes that you can browse by Ingredients, Cuisine, Dish Type, and even Mood. There are also readily accessible free How-To tutorials that will teach you how to pick the best fruits and veggies, properly carves a turkey, and many other cooking essentials.

Online Education Meets Tech Innovation

Neon Roots was there to shape Jeff’s vision for Salted through rapid iteration and agile development, landing on his MVP (minimum viable product) to get the highest return on the product with the smallest risk possible. Our work at the inception of Salted and putting it through our intensive product development service Rootstrap made that MVP development possible and helped determine how extensive this online school could ultimately be.

Salted has a lot of working parts and functionality and ease-of-use is paramount in getting new students on board and keeping them there. Our Los Angeles development shop used our talents to design and develop a site that captured the prestige of the product and found the best media player to stream Salted’s high quality video across multiple platforms and devices.

Salted is one of those high-concept, innovative ideas that we love to get behind. So close your browser, stop watching My Drunk Kitchen, and go check out the Salted site.